“Not retarded per se. My personal experience is most criminals stopped developing emotionally at about 3 or 4. They live life for the moment, think only of themselves, have no impulse control, can’t control their emotions, throw temper tantrums when they don’t get their way, can’t think past the next 10 minutes, don’t understand consequence, etc…… They are basically little children in adult bodies. Of course, most 3 or 4 year olds are better behaved than the average criminal, but you get the point.”

“I found that better than 90% of them were functionally illiterate, so when they say reading is fundamental, they aren’t kidding!”

Civilization comprises many things: a common language,
a common religion, a common political science and economy
(what used to be called "political economy," a common race, different but complimentary sex roles.

In the West, and especially the United States, it has been,
overwhelmingly, white Christians speaking English, and believing
in political and economic liberty, with different but complimentary sex roles. This has created a culture
so powerful it has always been able to assimilate a small number those of
different races, as long as they were really assimilated. This has
not always happened, unfortunately.

Radically different cultures always clash when they try to share the same land, to the point of not
only violence, but genocide. This has been the history of the
world.

"Multiculturalism" not only doesn't work, it always leads
to conflict, and by conflict I mean violence, death and
destruction.

Why cannot leftists figure this out? Are they that self-deluded? Do they hate Western civilization that much?
Apparently so.

By the way, the world is overdue for one of its periodic ethnic cleansings. It won't be us who gets cleansed.

This is a famous article written by Samuel P. Huntington. It's from Foreign Affairs, from 1993. Notice how prescient he was.

THE NEXT PATTERN OF CONFLICT

World politics is entering a new phase, and intellectuals have not hesitated to proliferate visions of what it will be-the end of history, the return of traditional rivalries between nation states, and the decline of the nation state from the conflicting pulls of tribalism and globalism, among others. Each of these visions catches aspects of the emerging reality. Yet they all miss a crucial, indeed a central, aspect of what global politics is likely to be in the coming years.

It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.

Conflict between civilizations will be the latest phase in the evolution of conflict in the modern world. For a century and a half after the emergence of the modern international system with the Peace of Westphalia, the conflicts of the Western world were largely among princes-emperors, absolute monarchs and constitutional monarchs attempting to expand their bureaucracies, their armies, their mercantilist economic strength and, most important, the territory they ruled. In the process they created nation states, and beginning with the French Revolution the principal lines of conflict were between nations rather than princes. In 1793, as R. R. Palmer put it, "The wars of kings were over; the wars of peoples had begun." This nineteenth-century pattern lasted until the end of World War I. Then, as a result of the Russian Revolution and the reaction against it, the conflict of nations yielded to the conflict of ideologies, first among communism, fascism-Nazism and liberal democracy, and then between communism and liberal democracy. During the Cold War, this latter conflict became embodied in the struggle between the two superpowers, neither of which was a nation state in the classical European sense and each of which defined its identity in terms of its ideology.

These conflicts between princes, nation states and ideologies were primarily conflicts within Western civilization, "Western civil wars," as William Lind has labeled them. This was as true of the Cold War as it was of the world wars and the earlier wars of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With the end of the Cold War, international politics moves out of its Western phase, and its centerpiece becomes the interaction between the West and non-Western civilizations and among non-Western civilizations. In the politics of civilizations, the peoples and governments of non-Western civilizations no longer remain the objects of history as targets of Western colonialism but join the West as movers and shapers of history.

THE NATURE OF CIVILIZATIONS

During the cold war the world was divided into the First, Second and Third Worlds. Those divisions are no longer relevant. It is far more meaningful now to group countries not in terms of their political or economic systems or in terms of their level of economic development but rather in terms of their culture and civilization.

What do we mean when we talk of a civilization? A civilization is a cultural entity. Villages, regions, ethnic groups, nationalities, religious groups, all have distinct cultures at different levels of cultural heterogeneity. The culture of a village in southern Italy may be different from that of a village in northern Italy, but both will share in a common Italian culture that distinguishes them from German villages. European communities, in turn, will share cultural features that distinguish them from Arab or Chinese communities. Arabs, Chinese and Westerners, however, are not part of any broader cultural entity. They constitute civilizations. A civilization is thus the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity people have short of that which distinguishes humans from other species. It is defined both by common objective elements, such as language, history, religion, customs, institutions, and by the subjective self-identification of people. People have levels of identity: a resident of Rome may define himself with varying degrees of intensity as a Roman, an Italian, a Catholic, a Christian, a European, a Westerner. The civilization to which he belongs is the broadest level of identification with which he intensely identifies. People can and do redefine their identities and, as a result, the composition and boundaries of civilizations change.

Civilizations may involve a large number of people, as with China ("a civilization pretending to be a state," as Lucian Pye put it), or a very small number of people, such as the Anglophone Caribbean. A civilization may include several nation states, as is the case with Western, Latin American and Arab civilizations, or only one, as is the case with Japanese civilization. Civilizations obviously blend and overlap, and may include subcivilizations. Western civilization has two major variants, European and North American, and Islam has its Arab, Turkic and Malay subdivisions. Civilizations are nonetheless meaningful entities, and while the lines between them are seldom sharp, they are real. Civilizations are dynamic; they rise and fall; they divide and merge. And, as any student of history knows, civilizations disappear and are buried in the sands of time.

Westerners tend to think of nation states as the principal actors in global affairs. They have been that, however, for only a few centuries. The broader reaches of human history have been the history of civilizations. In A Study of History, Arnold Toynbee identified 21 major civilizations; only six of them exist in the contemporary world.

WHY CIVILIZATIONS WILL CLASH

Civilization identity will be increasingly important in the future, and the world will be shaped in large measure by the interactions among seven or eight major civilizations. These include Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and possibly African civilization. The most important conflicts of the future will occur along the cultural fault lines separating these civilizations from one another.

Why will this be the case?

First, differences among civilizations are not only real; they are basic. Civilizations are differentiated from each other by history, language, culture, tradition and, most important, religion. The people of different civilizations have different views on the relations between God and man, the individual and the group, the citizen and the state, parents and children, husband and wife, as well as differing views of the relative importance of rights and responsibilities, liberty and authority, equality and hierarchy. These differences are the product of centuries. They will not soon disappear. They are far more fundamental than differences among political ideologies and political regimes. Differences do not necessarily mean conflict, and conflict does not necessarily mean violence. Over the centuries, however, differences among civilizations have generated the most prolonged and the most violent conflicts.

Second, the world is becoming a smaller place. The interactions between peoples of different civilizations are increasing; these increasing interactions intensify civilization consciousness and awareness of differences between civilizations and commonalities within civilizations. North African immigration to France generates hostility among Frenchmen and at the same time increased receptivity to immigration by "good'' European Catholic Poles. Americans react far more negatively to Japanese investment than to larger investments from Canada and European countries. Similarly, as Donald Horowitz has pointed out, "An Ibo may be ... an Owerri Ibo or an Onitsha Ibo in what was the Eastern region of Nigeria. In Lagos, he is simply an Ibo. In London, he is a Nigerian. In New York, he is an African." The interactions among peoples of different civilizations enhance the civilization-consciousness of people that, in turn, invigorates differences and animosities stretching or thought to stretch back deep into history.

Third, the processes of economic modernization and social change throughout the world are separating people from longstanding local identities. They also weaken the nation state as a source of identity. In much of the world religion has moved in to fill this gap, often in the form of movements that are labeled "fundamentalist." Such movements are found in Western Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism and Hinduism, as well as in Islam. In most countries and most religions the people active in fundamentalist movements are young, college-educated, middle-class technicians, professionals and business persons. The "unsecularization of the world," George Weigel has remarked, "is one of the dominant social facts of life in the late twentieth century." The revival of religion, "la revanche de Dieu," as Gilles Kepel labeled it, provides a basis for identity and commitment that transcends national boundaries and unites civilizations.

Fourth, the growth of civilization-consciousness is enhanced by the dual role of the West. On the one hand, the West is at a peak of power. At the same time, however, and perhaps as a result, a return to the roots phenomenon is occurring among non-Western civilizations. Increasingly one hears references to trends toward a turning inward and "Asianization" in Japan, the end of the Nehru legacy and the "Hinduization" of India, the failure of Western ideas of socialism and nationalism and hence "re-Islamization" of the Middle East, and now a debate over Westernization versus Russianization in Boris Yeltsin's country. A West at the peak of its power confronts non-Wests that increasingly have the desire, the will and the resources to shape the world in non-Western ways.

In the past, the elites of non-Western societies were usually the people who were most involved with the West, had been educated at Oxford, the Sorbonne or Sandhurst, and had absorbed Western attitudes and values. At the same time, the populace in non-Western countries often remained deeply imbued with the indigenous culture. Now, however, these relationships are being reversed. A de-Westernization and indigenization of elites is occurring in many non-Western countries at the same time that Western, usually American, cultures, styles and habits become more popular among the mass of the people.

Fifth, cultural characteristics and differences are less mutable and hence less easily compromised and resolved than political and economic ones. In the former Soviet Union, communists can become democrats, the rich can become poor and the poor rich, but Russians cannot become Estonians and Azeris cannot become Armenians. In class and ideological conflicts, the key question was "Which side are you on?" and people could and did choose sides and change sides. In conflicts between civilizations, the question is "What are you?" That is a given that cannot be changed. And as we know, from Bosnia to the Caucasus to the Sudan, the wrong answer to that question can mean a bullet in the head. Even more than ethnicity, religion discriminates sharply and exclusively among people. A person can be half-French and half-Arab and simultaneously even a citizen of two countries. It is more difficult to be half-Catholic and half-Muslim.

Finally, economic regionalism is increasing. The proportions of total trade that were intraregional rose between 1980 and 1989 from 51 percent to 59 percent in Europe, 33 percent to 37 percent in East Asia, and 32 percent to 36 percent in North America. The importance of regional economic blocs is likely to continue to increase in the future. On the one hand, successful economic regionalism will reinforce civilization-consciousness. On the other hand, economic regionalism may succeed only when it is rooted in a common civilization. The European Community rests on the shared foundation of European culture and Western Christianity. The success of the North American Free Trade Area depends on the convergence now underway of Mexican, Canadian and American cultures. Japan, in contrast, faces difficulties in creating a comparable economic entity in East Asia because Japan is a society and civilization unique to itself. However strong the trade and investment links Japan may develop with other East Asian countries, its cultural differences with those countries inhibit and perhaps preclude its promoting regional economic integration like that in Europe and North America.

Common culture, in contrast, is clearly facilitating the rapid expansion of the economic relations between the People's Republic of China and Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and the overseas Chinese communities in other Asian countries. With the Cold War over, cultural commonalities increasingly overcome ideological differences, and mainland China and Taiwan move closer together. If cultural commonality is a prerequisite for economic integration, the principal East Asian economic bloc of the future is likely to be centered on China. This bloc is, in fact, already coming into existence. As Murray Weidenbaum has observed,

Despite the current Japanese dominance of the region, the Chinese-based economy of Asia is rapidly emerging as a new epicenter for industry, commerce and finance. This strategic area contains substantial amounts of technology and manufacturing capability (Taiwan), outstanding entrepreneurial, marketing and services acumen (Hong Kong), a fine communications network (Singapore), a tremendous pool of financial capital (all three), and very large endowments of land, resources and labor (mainland China).... From Guangzhou to Singapore, from Kuala Lumpur to Manila, this influential network-often based on extensions of the traditional clans-has been described as the backbone of the East Asian economy.

Culture and religion also form the basis of the Economic Cooperation Organization, which brings together ten non-Arab Muslim countries: Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tadjikistan, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. One impetus to the revival and expansion of this organization, founded originally in the 1960s by Turkey, Pakistan and Iran, is the realization by the leaders of several of these countries that they had no chance of admission to the European Community. Similarly, Caricom, the Central American Common Market and Mercosur rest on common cultural foundations. Efforts to build a broader Caribbean-Central American economic entity bridging the Anglo-Latin divide, however, have to date failed.

As people define their identity in ethnic and religious terms, they are likely to see an "us" versus "them" relation existing between themselves and people of different ethnicity or religion. The end of ideologically defined states in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union permits traditional ethnic identities and animosities to come to the fore. Differences in culture and religion create differences over policy issues, ranging from human rights to immigration to trade and commerce to the environment. Geographical propinquity gives rise to conflicting territorial claims from Bosnia to Mindanao. Most important, the efforts of the West to promote its values of democracy and liberalism as universal values, to maintain its military predominance and to advance its economic interests engender countering responses from other civilizations. Decreasingly able to mobilize support and form coalitions on the basis of ideology, governments and groups will increasingly attempt to mobilize support by appealing to common religion and civilization identity.

The clash of civilizations thus occurs at two levels. At the micro- level, adjacent groups along the fault lines between civilizations struggle, often violently, over the control of territory and each other. At the macro-level, states from different civilizations compete for relative military and economic power, struggle over the control of international institutions and third parties, and competitively promote their particular political and religious values.

THE FAULT LINES BETWEEN CIVILIZATIONS

The fault lines between civilizations are replacing the political and ideological boundaries of the Cold War as the flash points for crisis and bloodshed. The Cold War began when the Iron Curtain divided Europe politically and ideologically. The Cold War ended with the end of the Iron Curtain. As the ideological division of Europe has disappeared, the cultural division of Europe between Western Christianity, on the one hand, and Orthodox Christianity and Islam, on the other, has reemerged. The most significant dividing line in Europe, as William Wallace has suggested, may well be the eastern boundary of Western Christianity in the year 1500. This line runs along what are now the boundaries between Finland and Russia and between the Baltic states and Russia, cuts through Belarus and Ukraine separating the more Catholic western Ukraine from Orthodox eastern Ukraine, swings westward separating Transylvania from the rest of Romania, and then goes through Yugoslavia almost exactly along the line now separating Croatia and Slovenia from the rest of Yugoslavia. In the Balkans this line, of course, coincides with the historic boundary between the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires. The peoples to the north and west of this line are Protestant or Catholic; they shared the common experiences of European history-feudalism, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution; they are generally economically better off than the peoples to the east; and they may now look forward to increasing involvement in a common European economy and to the consolidation of democratic political systems. The peoples to the east and south of this line are Orthodox or Muslim; they historically belonged to the Ottoman or Tsarist empires and were only lightly touched by the shaping events in the rest of Europe; they are generally less advanced economically; they seem much less likely to develop stable democratic political systems. The Velvet Curtain of culture has replaced the Iron Curtain of ideology as the most significant dividing line in Europe. As the events in Yugoslavia show, it is not only a line of difference; it is also at times a line of bloody conflict.

Conflict along the fault line between Western and Islamic civilizations has been going on for 1,300 years. After the founding of Islam, the Arab and Moorish surge west and north only ended at Tours in 732. From the eleventh to the thirteenth century the Crusaders attempted with temporary success to bring Christianity and Christian rule to the Holy Land. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, the Ottoman Turks reversed the balance, extended their sway over the Middle East and the Balkans, captured Constantinople, and twice laid siege to Vienna. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as Ottoman power declined Britain, France, and Italy established Western control over most of North Africa and the Middle East.

After World War II, the West, in turn, began to retreat; the colonial empires disappeared; first Arab nationalism and then Islamic fundamentalism manifested themselves; the West became heavily dependent on the Persian Gulf countries for its energy; the oil-rich Muslim countries became money-rich and, when they wished to, weapons-rich. Several wars occurred between Arabs and Israel (created by the West). France fought a bloody and ruthless war in Algeria for most of the 1950s; British and French forces invaded Egypt in 1956; American forces went into Lebanon in 1958; subsequently American forces returned to Lebanon, attacked Libya, and engaged in various military encounters with Iran; Arab and Islamic terrorists, supported by at least three Middle Eastern governments, employed the weapon of the weak and bombed Western planes and installations and seized Western hostages. This warfare between Arabs and the West culminated in 1990, when the United States sent a massive army to the Persian Gulf to defend some Arab countries against aggression by another. In its aftermath NATO planning is increasingly directed to potential threats and instability along its "southern tier."

This centuries-old military interaction between the West and Islam is unlikely to decline. It could become more virulent. The Gulf War left some Arabs feeling proud that Saddam Hussein had attacked Israel and stood up to the West. It also left many feeling humiliated and resentful of the West's military presence in the Persian Gulf, the West's overwhelming military dominance, and their apparent inability to shape their own destiny. Many Arab countries, in addition to the oil exporters, are reaching levels of economic and social development where autocratic forms of government become inappropriate and efforts to introduce democracy become stronger. Some openings in Arab political systems have already occurred. The principal beneficiaries of these openings have been Islamist movements. In the Arab world, in short, Western democracy strengthens anti-Western political forces. This may be a passing phenomenon, but it surely complicates relations between Islamic countries and the West.

Those relations are also complicated by demography. The spectacular population growth in Arab countries, particularly in North Africa, has led to increased migration to Western Europe. The movement within Western Europe toward minimizing internal boundaries has sharpened political sensitivities with respect to this development. In Italy, France and Germany, racism is increasingly open, and political reactions and violence against Arab and Turkish migrants have become more intense and more widespread since 1990.

On both sides the interaction between Islam and the West is seen as a clash of civilizations. The West's "next confrontation," observes M. J. Akbar, an Indian Muslim author, "is definitely going to come from the Muslim world. It is in the sweep of the Islamic nations from the Maghreb to Pakistan that the struggle for a new world order will begin." Bernard Lewis comes to a similar conclusion:

We are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no less than a clash of civilizations-the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both.

Historically, the other great antagonistic interaction of Arab Islamic civilization has been with the pagan, animist, and now increasingly Christian black peoples to the south. In the past, this antagonism was epitomized in the image of Arab slave dealers and black slaves. It has been reflected in the on-going civil war in the Sudan between Arabs and blacks, the fighting in Chad between Libyan-supported insurgents and the government, the tensions between Orthodox Christians and Muslims in the Horn of Africa, and the political conflicts, recurring riots and communal violence between Muslims and Christians in Nigeria. The modernization of Africa and the spread of Christianity are likely to enhance the probability of violence along this fault line. Symptomatic of the intensification of this conflict was the Pope John Paul II's speech in Khartoum in February 1993 attacking the actions of the Sudan's Islamist government against the Christian minority there.

On the northern border of Islam, conflict has increasingly erupted between Orthodox and Muslim peoples, including the carnage of Bosnia and Sarajevo, the simmering violence between Serb and Albanian, the tenuous relations between Bulgarians and their Turkish minority, the violence between Ossetians and Ingush, the unremitting slaughter of each other by Armenians and Azeris, the tense relations between Russians and Muslims in Central Asia, and the deployment of Russian troops to protect Russian interests in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Religion reinforces the revival of ethnic identities and restimulates Russian fears about the security of their southern borders. This concern is well captured by Archie Roosevelt:

Much of Russian history concerns the struggle between the Slavs and the Turkic peoples on their borders, which dates back to the foundation of the Russian state more than a thousand years ago. In the Slavs' millennium-long confrontation with their eastern neighbors lies the key to an understanding not only of Russian history, but Russian character. To understand Russian realities today one has to have a concept of the great Turkic ethnic group that has preoccupied Russians through the centuries.

The conflict of civilizations is deeply rooted elsewhere in Asia. The historic clash between Muslim and Hindu in the subcontinent manifests itself now not only in the rivalry between Pakistan and India but also in intensifying religious strife within India between increasingly militant Hindu groups and India's substantial Muslim minority. The destruction of the Ayodhya mosque in December 1992 brought to the fore the issue of whether India will remain a secular democratic state or become a Hindu one. In East Asia, China has outstanding territorial disputes with most of its neighbors. It has pursued a ruthless policy toward the Buddhist people of Tibet, and it is pursuing an increasingly ruthless policy toward its Turkic-Muslim minority. With the Cold War over, the underlying differences between China and the United States have reasserted themselves in areas such as human rights, trade and weapons proliferation. These differences are unlikely to moderate. A "new cold war," Deng Xaioping reportedly asserted in 1991, is under way between China and America.

The same phrase has been applied to the increasingly difficult relations between Japan and the United States. Here cultural difference exacerbates economic conflict. People on each side allege racism on the other, but at least on the American side the antipathies are not racial but cultural. The basic values, attitudes, behavioral patterns of the two societies could hardly be more different. The economic issues between the United States and Europe are no less serious than those between the United States and Japan, but they do not have the same political salience and emotional intensity because the differences between American culture and European culture are so much less than those between American civilization and Japanese civilization.

The interactions between civilizations vary greatly in the extent to which they are likely to be characterized by violence. Economic competition clearly predominates between the American and European subcivilizations of the West and between both of them and Japan. On the Eurasian continent, however, the proliferation of ethnic conflict, epitomized at the extreme in "ethnic cleansing," has not been totally random. It has been most frequent and most violent between groups belonging to different civilizations. In Eurasia the great historic fault lines between civilizations are once more aflame. This is particularly true along the boundaries of the crescent-shaped Islamic bloc of nations from the bulge of Africa to central Asia. Violence also occurs between Muslims, on the one hand, and Orthodox Serbs in the Balkans, Jews in Israel, Hindus in India, Buddhists in Burma and Catholics in the Philippines. Islam has bloody borders.

CIVILIZATION RALLYING: THE KIN-COUNTRY SYNDROME

Groups or states belonging to one civilization that become involved in war with people from a different civilization naturally try to rally support from other members of their own civilization. As the post-Cold War world evolves, civilization commonality, what H. D. S. Greenway has termed the "kin-country" syndrome, is replacing political ideology and traditional balance of power considerations as the principal basis for cooperation and coalitions. It can be seen gradually emerging in the post-Cold War conflicts in the Persian Gulf, the Caucasus and Bosnia. None of these was a full-scale war between civilizations, but each involved some elements of civilizational rallying, which seemed to become more important as the conflict continued and which may provide a foretaste of the future.

First, in the Gulf War one Arab state invaded another and then fought a coalition of Arab, Western and other states. While only a few Muslim governments overtly supported Saddam Hussein, many Arab elites privately cheered him on, and he was highly popular among large sections of the Arab publics. Islamic fundamentalist movements universally supported Iraq rather than the Western-backed governments of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Forswearing Arab nationalism, Saddam Hussein explicitly invoked an Islamic appeal. He and his supporters attempted to define the war as a war between civilizations. "It is not the world against Iraq," as Safar Al-Hawali, dean of Islamic Studies at the Umm Al-Qura University in Mecca, put it in a widely circulated tape. "It is the West against Islam." Ignoring the rivalry between Iran and Iraq, the chief Iranian religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, called for a holy war against the West: "The struggle against American aggression, greed, plans and policies will be counted as a jihad, and anybody who is killed on that path is a martyr." "This is a war," King Hussein of Jordan argued, "against all Arabs and all Muslims and not against Iraq alone."

The rallying of substantial sections of Arab elites and publics behind Saddam Hussein caused those Arab governments in the anti-Iraq coalition to moderate their activities and temper their public statements. Arab governments opposed or distanced themselves from subsequent Western efforts to apply pressure on Iraq, including enforcement of a no-fly zone in the summer of 1992 and the bombing of Iraq in January 1993. The Western-Soviet-Turkish-Arab anti-Iraq coalition of 1990 had by 1993 become a coalition of almost only the West and Kuwait against Iraq.

Muslims contrasted Western actions against Iraq with the West's failure to protect Bosnians against Serbs and to impose sanctions on Israel for violating U.N. resolutions. The West, they alleged, was using a double standard. A world of clashing civilizations, however, is inevitably a world of double standards: people apply one standard to their kin-countries and a different standard to others.

Second, the kin-country syndrome also appeared in conflicts in the former Soviet Union. Armenian military successes in 1992 and 1993 stimulated Turkey to become increasingly supportive of its religious, ethnic and linguistic brethren in Azerbaijan. "We have a Turkish nation feeling the same sentiments as the Azerbaijanis," said one Turkish official in 1992. "We are under pressure. Our newspapers are full of the photos of atrocities and are asking us if we are still serious about pursuing our neutral policy. Maybe we should show Armenia that there's a big Turkey in the region." President Turgut Özal agreed, remarking that Turkey should at least "scare the Armenians a little bit." Turkey, Özal threatened again in 1993, would "show its fangs." Turkish Air Force jets flew reconnaissance flights along the Armenian border; Turkey suspended food shipments and air flights to Armenia; and Turkey and Iran announced they would not accept dismemberment of Azerbaijan. In the last years of its existence, the Soviet government supported Azerbaijan because its government was dominated by former communists. With the end of the Soviet Union, however, political considerations gave way to religious ones. Russian troops fought on the side of the Armenians, and Azerbaijan accused the "Russian government of turning 180 degrees" toward support for Christian Armenia.

Third, with respect to the fighting in the former Yugoslavia, Western publics manifested sympathy and support for the Bosnian Muslims and the horrors they suffered at the hands of the Serbs. Relatively little concern was expressed, however, over Croatian attacks on Muslims and participation in the dismemberment of Bosnia-Herzegovina. In the early stages of the Yugoslav breakup, Germany, in an unusual display of diplomatic initiative and muscle, induced the other 11 members of the European Community to follow its lead in recognizing Slovenia and Croatia. As a result of the pope's determination to provide strong backing to the two Catholic countries, the Vatican extended recognition even before the Community did. The United States followed the European lead. Thus the leading actors in Western civilization rallied behind their coreligionists. Subsequently Croatia was reported to be receiving substantial quantities of arms from Central European and other Western countries. Boris Yeltsin's government, on the other hand, attempted to pursue a middle course that would be sympathetic to the Orthodox Serbs but not alienate Russia from the West. Russian conservative and nationalist groups, however, including many legislators, attacked the government for not being more forthcoming in its support for the Serbs. By early 1993 several hundred Russians apparently were serving with the Serbian forces, and reports circulated of Russian arms being supplied to Serbia.

Islamic governments and groups, on the other hand, castigated the West for not coming to the defense of the Bosnians. Iranian leaders urged Muslims from all countries to provide help to Bosnia; in violation of the U.N. arms embargo, Iran supplied weapons and men for the Bosnians; Iranian-supported Lebanese groups sent guerrillas to train and organize the Bosnian forces. In 1993 up to 4,000 Muslims from over two dozen Islamic countries were reported to be fighting in Bosnia. The governments of Saudi Arabia and other countries felt under increasing pressure from fundamentalist groups in their own societies to provide more vigorous support for the Bosnians. By the end of 1992, Saudi Arabia had reportedly supplied substantial funding for weapons and supplies for the Bosnians, which significantly increased their military capabilities vis-à-vis the Serbs.

In the 1930s the Spanish Civil War provoked intervention from countries that politically were fascist, communist and democratic. In the 1990s the Yugoslav conflict is provoking intervention from countries that are Muslim, Orthodox and Western Christian. The parallel has not gone unnoticed. "The war in Bosnia-Herzegovina has become the emotional equivalent of the fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War," one Saudi editor observed. "Those who died there are regarded as martyrs who tried to save their fellow Muslims."

Conflicts and violence will also occur between states and groups within the same civilization. Such conflicts, however, are likely to be less intense and less likely to expand than conflicts between civilizations. Common membership in a civilization reduces the probability of violence in situations where it might otherwise occur. In 1991 and 1992 many people were alarmed by the possibility of violent conflict between Russia and Ukraine over territory, particularly Crimea, the Black Sea fleet, nuclear weapons and economic issues. If civilization is what counts, however, the likelihood of violence between Ukrainians and Russians should be low. They are two Slavic, primarily Orthodox peoples who have had close relationships with each other for centuries. As of early 1993, despite all the reasons for conflict, the leaders of the two countries were effectively negotiating and defusing the issues between the two countries. While there has been serious fighting between Muslims and Christians elsewhere in the former Soviet Union and much tension and some fighting between Western and Orthodox Christians in the Baltic states, there has been virtually no violence between Russians and Ukrainians.

Civilization rallying to date has been limited, but it has been growing, and it clearly has the potential to spread much further. As the conflicts in the Persian Gulf, the Caucasus and Bosnia continued, the positions of nations and the cleavages between them increasingly were along civilizational lines. Populist politicians, religious leaders and the media have found it a potent means of arousing mass support and of pressuring hesitant governments. In the coming years, the local conflicts most likely to escalate into major wars will be those, as in Bosnia and the Caucasus, along the fault lines between civilizations. The next world war, if there is one, will be a war between civilizations.

THE WEST VERSUS THE REST

The west is now at an extraordinary peak of power in relation to other civilizations. Its superpower opponent has disappeared from the map. Military conflict among Western states is unthinkable, and Western military power is unrivaled. Apart from Japan, the West faces no economic challenge. It dominates international political and security institutions and with Japan international economic institutions. Global political and security issues are effectively settled by a directorate of the United States, Britain and France, world economic issues by a directorate of the United States, Germany and Japan, all of which maintain extraordinarily close relations with each other to the exclusion of lesser and largely non-Western countries. Decisions made at the U.N. Security Council or in the International Monetary Fund that reflect the interests of the West are presented to the world as reflecting the desires of the world community. The very phrase "the world community" has become the euphemistic collective noun (replacing "the Free World") to give global legitimacy to actions reflecting the interests of the United States and other Western powers.› Through the IMF and other international economic institutions, the West promotes its economic interests and imposes on other nations the economic policies it thinks appropriate. In any poll of non-Western peoples, the IMF undoubtedly would win the support of finance ministers and a few others, but get an overwhelmingly unfavorable rating from just about everyone else, who would agree with Georgy Arbatov's characterization of IMF officials as "neo-Bolsheviks who love expropriating other people's money, imposing undemocratic and alien rules of economic and political conduct and stifling economic freedom."

Western domination of the U.N. Security Council and its decisions, tempered only by occasional abstention by China, produced U.N. legitimation of the West's use of force to drive Iraq out of Kuwait and its elimination of Iraq's sophisticated weapons and capacity to produce such weapons. It also produced the quite unprecedented action by the United States, Britain and France in getting the Security Council to demand that Libya hand over the Pan Am 103 bombing suspects and then to impose sanctions when Libya refused. After defeating the largest Arab army, the West did not hesitate to throw its weight around in the Arab world. The West in effect is using international institutions, military power and economic resources to run the world in ways that will maintain Western predominance, protect Western interests and promote Western political and economic values.

That at least is the way in which non-Westerners see the new world, and there is a significant element of truth in their view. Differences in power and struggles for military, economic and institutional power are thus one source of conflict between the West and other civilizations. Differences in culture, that is basic values and beliefs, are a second source of conflict. V. S. Naipaul has argued that Western civilization is the "universal civilization" that "fits all men." At a superficial level much of Western culture has indeed permeated the rest of the world. At a more basic level, however, Western concepts differ fundamentally from those prevalent in other civilizations. Western ideas of individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, the separation of church and state, often have little resonance in Islamic, Confucian, Japanese, Hindu, Buddhist or Orthodox cultures. Western efforts to propagate such ideas produce instead a reaction against "human rights imperialism" and a reaffirmation of indigenous values, as can be seen in the support for religious fundamentalism by the younger generation in non-Western cultures. The very notion that there could be a "universal civilization" is a Western idea, directly at odds with the particularism of most Asian societies and their emphasis on what distinguishes one people from another. Indeed, the author of a review of 100 comparative studies of values in different societies concluded that "the values that are most important in the West are least important worldwide." In the political realm, of course, these differences are most manifest in the efforts of the United States and other Western powers to induce other peoples to adopt Western ideas concerning democracy and human rights. Modern democratic government originated in the West. When it has developed in non-Western societies it has usually been the product of Western colonialism or imposition.

The central axis of world politics in the future is likely to be, in Kishore Mahbubani's phrase, the conflict between "the West and the Rest" and the responses of non-Western civilizations to Western power and values. Those responses generally take one or a combination of three forms. At one extreme, non-Western states can, like Burma and North Korea, attempt to pursue a course of isolation, to insulate their societies from penetration or "corruption" by the West, and, in effect, to opt out of participation in the Western-dominated global community. The costs of this course, however, are high, and few states have pursued it exclusively. A second alternative, the equivalent of "band-wagoning" in international relations theory, is to attempt to join the West and accept its values and institutions. The third alternative is to attempt to "balance" the West by developing economic and military power and cooperating with other non-Western societies against the West, while preserving indigenous values and institutions; in short, to modernize but not to Westernize.

THE TORN COUNTRIES

In the future, as people differentiate themselves by civilization, countries with large numbers of peoples of different civilizations, such as the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, are candidates for dismemberment. Some other countries have a fair degree of cultural homogeneity but are divided over whether their society belongs to one civilization or another. These are torn countries. Their leaders typically wish to pursue a bandwagoning strategy and to make their countries members of the West, but the history, culture and traditions of their countries are non-Western. The most obvious and prototypical torn country is Turkey. The late twentieth-century leaders of Turkey have followed in the Attatürk tradition and defined Turkey as a modern, secular, Western nation state. They allied Turkey with the West in NATO and in the Gulf War; they applied for membership in the European Community. At the same time, however, elements in Turkish society have supported an Islamic revival and have argued that Turkey is basically a Middle Eastern Muslim society. In addition, while the elite of Turkey has defined Turkey as a Western society, the elite of the West refuses to accept Turkey as such. Turkey will not become a member of the European Community, and the real reason, as President Özal said, "is that we are Muslim and they are Christian and they don't say that." Having rejected Mecca, and then being rejected by Brussels, where does Turkey look? Tashkent may be the answer. The end of the Soviet Union gives Turkey the opportunity to become the leader of a revived Turkic civilization involving seven countries from the borders of Greece to those of China. Encouraged by the West, Turkey is making strenuous efforts to carve out this new identity for itself.

During the past decade Mexico has assumed a position somewhat similar to that of Turkey. Just as Turkey abandoned its historic opposition to Europe and attempted to join Europe, Mexico has stopped defining itself by its opposition to the United States and is instead attempting to imitate the United States and to join it in the North American Free Trade Area. Mexican leaders are engaged in the great task of redefining Mexican identity and have introduced fundamental economic reforms that eventually will lead to fundamental political change. In 1991 a top adviser to President Carlos Salinas de Gortari described at length to me all the changes the Salinas government was making. When he finished, I remarked: "That's most impressive. It seems to me that basically you want to change Mexico from a Latin American country into a North American country." He looked at me with surprise and exclaimed: "Exactly! That's precisely what we are trying to do, but of course we could never say so publicly." As his remark indicates, in Mexico as in Turkey, significant elements in society resist the redefinition of their country's identity. In Turkey, European-oriented leaders have to make gestures to Islam (Özal's pilgrimage to Mecca); so also Mexico's North American-oriented leaders have to make gestures to those who hold Mexico to be a Latin American country (Salinas' Ibero-American Guadalajara summit).

Historically Turkey has been the most profoundly torn country. For the United States, Mexico is the most immediate torn country. Globally the most important torn country is Russia. The question of whether Russia is part of the West or the leader of a distinct Slavic-Orthodox civilization has been a recurring one in Russian history. That issue was obscured by the communist victory in Russia, which imported a Western ideology, adapted it to Russian conditions and then challenged the West in the name of that ideology. The dominance of communism shut off the historic debate over Westernization versus Russification. With communism discredited Russians once again face that question.

President Yeltsin is adopting Western principles and goals and seeking to make Russia a "normal" country and a part of the West. Yet both the Russian elite and the Russian public are divided on this issue. Among the more moderate dissenters, Sergei Stankevich argues that Russia should reject the "Atlanticist" course, which would lead it "to become European, to become a part of the world economy in rapid and organized fashion, to become the eighth member of the Seven, and to put particular emphasis on Germany and the United States as the two dominant members of the Atlantic alliance." While also rejecting an exclusively Eurasian policy, Stankevich nonetheless argues that Russia should give priority to the protection of Russians in other countries, emphasize its Turkic and Muslim connections, and promote "an appreciable redistribution of our resources, our options, our ties, and our interests in favor of Asia, of the eastern direction." People of this persuasion criticize Yeltsin for subordinating Russia's interests to those of the West, for reducing Russian military strength, for failing to support traditional friends such as Serbia, and for pushing economic and political reform in ways injurious to the Russian people. Indicative of this trend is the new popularity of the ideas of Petr Savitsky, who in the 1920s argued that Russia was a unique Eurasian civilization.‡ More extreme dissidents voice much more blatantly nationalist, anti-Western and anti-Semitic views, and urge Russia to redevelop its military strength and to establish closer ties with China and Muslim countries. The people of Russia are as divided as the elite. An opinion survey in European Russia in the spring of 1992 revealed that 40 percent of the public had positive attitudes toward the West and 36 percent had negative attitudes. As it has been for much of its history, Russia in the early 1990s is truly a torn country.

To redefine its civilization identity, a torn country must meet three requirements. First, its political and economic elite has to be generally supportive of and enthusiastic about this move. Second, its public has to be willing to acquiesce in the redefinition. Third, the dominant groups in the recipient civilization have to be willing to embrace the convert. All three requirements in large part exist with respect to Mexico. The first two in large part exist with respect to Turkey. It is not clear that any of them exist with respect to Russia's joining the West. The conflict between liberal democracy and Marxism-Leninism was between ideologies which, despite their major differences, ostensibly shared ultimate goals of freedom, equality and prosperity. A traditional, authoritarian, nationalist Russia could have quite different goals. A Western democrat could carry on an intellectual debate with a Soviet Marxist. It would be virtually impossible for him to do that with a Russian traditionalist. If, as the Russians stop behaving like Marxists, they reject liberal democracy and begin behaving like Russians but not like Westerners, the relations between Russia and the West could again become distant and conflictual.

THE CONFUCIAN-ISLAMIC CONNECTION

The obstacles to non-Western countries joining the West vary considerably. They are least for Latin American and East European countries. They are greater for the Orthodox countries of the former Soviet Union. They are still greater for Muslim, Confucian, Hindu and Buddhist societies. Japan has established a unique position for itself as an associate member of the West: it is in the West in some respects but clearly not of the West in important dimensions. Those countries that for reason of culture and power do not wish to, or cannot, join the West compete with the West by developing their own economic, military and political power. They do this by promoting their internal development and by cooperating with other non-Western countries. The most prominent form of this cooperation is the Confucian-Islamic connection that has emerged to challenge Western interests, values and power.

Almost without exception, Western countries are reducing their military power; under Yeltsin's leadership so also is Russia. China, North Korea and several Middle Eastern states, however, are significantly expanding their military capabilities. They are doing this by the import of arms from Western and non-Western sources and by the development of indigenous arms industries. One result is the emergence of what Charles Krauthammer has called "Weapon States," and the Weapon States are not Western states. Another result is the redefinition of arms control, which is a Western concept and a Western goal. During the Cold War the primary purpose of arms control was to establish a stable military balance between the United States and its allies and the Soviet Union and its allies. In the post-Cold War world the primary objective of arms control is to prevent the development by non-Western societies of military capabilities that could threaten Western interests. The West attempts to do this through international agreements, economic pressure and controls on the transfer of arms and weapons technologies.

The conflict between the West and the Confucian-Islamic states focuses largely, although not exclusively, on nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, ballistic missiles and other sophisticated means for delivering them, and the guidance, intelligence and other electronic capabilities for achieving that goal. The West promotes nonproliferation as a universal norm and nonproliferation treaties and inspections as means of realizing that norm. It also threatens a variety of sanctions against those who promote the spread of sophisticated weapons and proposes some benefits for those who do not. The attention of the West focuses, naturally, on nations that are actually or potentially hostile to the West.

The non-Western nations, on the other hand, assert their right to acquire and to deploy whatever weapons they think necessary for their security. They also have absorbed, to the full, the truth of the response of the Indian defense minister when asked what lesson he learned from the Gulf War: "Don't fight the United States unless you have nuclear weapons." Nuclear weapons, chemical weapons and missiles are viewed, probably erroneously, as the potential equalizer of superior Western conventional power. China, of course, already has nuclear weapons; Pakistan and India have the capability to deploy them. North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Libya and Algeria appear to be attempting to acquire them. A top Iranian official has declared that all Muslim states should acquire nuclear weapons, and in 1988 the president of Iran reportedly issued a directive calling for development of "offensive and defensive chemical, biological and radiological weapons."

Centrally important to the development of counter-West military capabilities is the sustained expansion of China's military power and its means to create military power. Buoyed by spectacular economic development, China is rapidly increasing its military spending and vigorously moving forward with the modernization of its armed forces. It is purchasing weapons from the former Soviet states; it is developing long-range missiles; in 1992 it tested a one-megaton nuclear device. It is developing power-projection capabilities, acquiring aerial refueling technology, and trying to purchase an aircraft carrier. Its military buildup and assertion of sovereignty over the South China Sea are provoking a multilateral regional arms race in East Asia. China is also a major exporter of arms and weapons technology. It has exported materials to Libya and Iraq that could be used to manufacture nuclear weapons and nerve gas. It has helped Algeria build a reactor suitable for nuclear weapons research and production. China has sold to Iran nuclear technology that American officials believe could only be used to create weapons and apparently has shipped components of 300-mile-range missiles to Pakistan. North Korea has had a nuclear weapons program under way for some while and has sold advanced missiles and missile technology to Syria and Iran. The flow of weapons and weapons technology is generally from East Asia to the Middle East. There is, however, some movement in the reverse direction; China has received Stinger missiles from Pakistan.

A Confucian-Islamic military connection has thus come into being, designed to promote acquisition by its members of the weapons and weapons technologies needed to counter the military power of the West. It may or may not last. At present, however, it is, as Dave McCurdy has said, "a renegades' mutual support pact, run by the proliferators and their backers." A new form of arms competition is thus occurring between Islamic-Confucian states and the West. In an old-fashioned arms race, each side developed its own arms to balance or to achieve superiority against the other side. In this new form of arms competition, one side is developing its arms and the other side is attempting not to balance but to limit and prevent that arms build-up while at the same time reducing its own military capabilities.

IMPLICATIONS FOR THE WEST

This article does not argue that civilization identities will replace all other identities, that nation states will disappear, that each civilization will become a single coherent political entity, that groups within a civilization will not conflict with and even fight each other. This paper does set forth the hypotheses that differences between civilizations are real and important; civilization-consciousness is increasing; conflict between civilizations will supplant ideological and other forms of conflict as the dominant global form of conflict; international relations, historically a game played out within Western civilization, will increasingly be de-Westernized and become a game in which non-Western civilizations are actors and not simply objects; successful political, security and economic international institutions are more likely to develop within civilizations than across civilizations; conflicts between groups in different civilizations will be more frequent, more sustained and more violent than conflicts between groups in the same civilization; violent conflicts between groups in different civilizations are the most likely and most dangerous source of escalation that could lead to global wars; the paramount axis of world politics will be the relations between "the West and the Rest"; the elites in some torn non-Western countries will try to make their countries part of the West, but in most cases face major obstacles to accomplishing this; a central focus of conflict for the immediate future will be between the West and several Islamic-Confucian states.

This is not to advocate the desirability of conflicts between civilizations. It is to set forth descriptive hypotheses as to what the future may be like. If these are plausible hypotheses, however, it is necessary to consider their implications for Western policy. These implications should be divided between short-term advantage and long-term accommodation. In the short term it is clearly in the interest of the West to promote greater cooperation and unity within its own civilization, particularly between its European and North American components; to incorporate into the West societies in Eastern Europe and Latin America whose cultures are close to those of the West; to promote and maintain cooperative relations with Russia and Japan; to prevent escalation of local inter-civilization conflicts into major inter-civilization wars; to limit the expansion of the military strength of Confucian and Islamic states; to moderate the reduction of Western military capabilities and maintain military superiority in East and Southwest Asia; to exploit differences and conflicts among Confucian and Islamic states; to support in other civilizations groups sympathetic to Western values and interests; to strengthen international institutions that reflect and legitimate Western interests and values and to promote the involvement of non-Western states in those institutions.

In the longer term other measures would be called for. Western civilization is both Western and modern. Non-Western civilizations have attempted to become modern without becoming Western. To date only Japan has fully succeeded in this quest. Non-Western civilizations will continue to attempt to acquire the wealth, technology, skills, machines and weapons that are part of being modern. They will also attempt to reconcile this modernity with their traditional culture and values. Their economic and military strength relative to the West will increase. Hence the West will increasingly have to accommodate these non-Western modern civilizations whose power approaches that of the West but whose values and interests differ significantly from those of the West. This will require the West to maintain the economic and military power necessary to protect its interests in relation to these civilizations. It will also, however, require the West to develop a more profound understanding of the basic religious and philosophical assumptions underlying other civilizations and the ways in which people in those civilizations see their interests. It will require an effort to identify elements of commonality between Western and other civilizations. For the relevant future, there will be no universal civilization, but instead a world of different civilizations, each of which will have to learn to coexist with the others.

Friday, October 30, 2015

I'm not going to post the article because it contains a lot of pictures and graphs. I will say that Russia and China are not the threats that the paranoids think they are. For one thing, there is an old saying, "Whites create and Asians copy." It's true. And Russia is still socialist, not to mention a dying country. And China is trying to boost its population because it is aging.

Please remember when a child is born it takes about 20 years - if not more - until that particular human becomes productive.

"Innovation is the lifeblood of the global economy. It is what drives the advancement of better technologies, improved medicine, streamlined services and most new products and solutions." __ Reuters

Wednesday, October 28, 2015

I've pointed out several times the Manosphere's concept of an "alpha" is a narcissist/psychopath and that the "Dark Triad" is always destructive (no society has ever condoned such people and often killed them for the trouble they caused). It's also why I've also pointed out that "Roissy" and "Roosh," when they talk about men and women, are fools, and "Vox Day," naive.

Last week I took a brief look at the first part of Genesis 3:16, a verse which describes the consequence of the woman’s role in the fall into sin. In the first part of God’s judgment on the woman he declared that bearing children would now be painful and traumatic. Her primary life function would be full of toil. Today I want to look at the second part of that judgment where God says “Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.” Here God declares that the woman’s primary relationship—the relationship to her husband—would also be disrupted. The marriage relationship, the relationship that was to be central in family, in culture, in church—the very building-block relationship of human beings, would suffer the effects of the Fall. There are two things of importance here: first, what it means that a woman’s desire shall be for her husband, and second, what it means that he shall rule over her.

HER DESIRE

First let’s look at what it means that a woman’s desire shall be for her husband. “Your desire shall be for your husband.” What is this desire? Some have taught that this is a kind of sexual desire, that part of the consequence for a woman’s sin is that she would have a sexual desire for her husband or a kind of abnormal sexual desire for him. These people look to Song of Solomon where this word desire is used; there the woman says, “I am my beloved’s, and his desire is for me.” That does speak of a kind of longing, a kind of sexual desire. But this hardly sounds like a consequence for sin. Quite the opposite is true. A woman who feels sexual desire for her husband is blessed by God. This is a good desire, a desire a woman should long to have. So what else can it mean?

This is a case where we can follow one of those great principles of interpreting the Bible and simply let a more clear passage help us interpret a less clear passage. When Moses wrote Genesis he gave us a very helpful way to understand what is meant by the woman’s desire. We need only look to Genesis 4:6-7. Here Cain has had his offering rejected by God while his brother Abel has had his offering accepted by God. Cain is furious; his whole countenance has changed. Jealousy and murder are rising up in his heart. The Lord comes to Cain and gives him a rebuke, a kind warning. He says, “Why are you angry, and why has your face fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it.” Here is that same word—desire.

In this verse sin is described in animal terms—like a lion or tiger hiding by a door. You open the door, and there it is, coiled and ready to pounce. Or maybe the author wants us to think about a snake here, a serpent like the devil. The moment that door is opened, Wham!, Sin pounces all over you. Sin wants to dominate and destroy you. It is out to get you by dominating you.

Keeping that in mind, we can go back to Genesis 3 where God tells the woman, “Your desire shall be for your husband.” What we see is that God is not referring to a good sexual desire, but about that bad, sinful desire, just like in his warning to Cain. A woman’s desire shall be to dominate her husband just like sin seeks to dominate all of us. In place of the family structure God calls us to, with a husband lovingly leading his wife and the wife joyfully submitting to his leadership, there would now be a power struggle, a struggle to dominate.

A woman’s desire for her husband shall be a desire to push him out of his place of leadership. It should not be lost on us that this is exactly what happened when man fell—the woman was led by a creature and the man was led by his wife. The whole God-ordained leadership structure was reversed. And that is how it continues today. A wife struggles to submit to her husband. The ESV puts a little note in the text explaining that the word for could also be translated against. The woman’s desire shall now be against her husband—against his God-given position of leadership and authority. Her heart will rebel against what God has said is good. The woman will engage a lifelong battle against this sin. It’s part of her sinful nature.

And this is true today, isn’t it? God created something good, something perfect, when he created the marriage relationship, when he said that Adam was to lead his wife and that she was to joyfully follow him. And yet every wife can testify to the struggle it is to submit to her husband’s leadership. Of course in a perfect world it should have been perfectly easy. But in this world a wife’s submission means that she must sinlessly submit to a sinful man. That is a difficult thing to do. But it is exactly what God calls her to.

HIS RULE

The husband, too, will be prone to sin. The text says, “Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.” The loving leadership of the husband will be replaced with a desire to rule, to master, to exercise a kind of lordship. This is not the kind of leadership that places the wife’s concerns on the front burner or that seeks her good above his own. Instead, it is the kind of leadership that dominates, that squelches, that cares foremost about self. While the wife seeks to usurp the man’s position, he will love himself more than he loves his wife. He will make it very difficult for her to submit to him. Not all the time; man will still love his wife in a genuine way. But sin will be crouching outside his door, too, seeking to overtake him.

This is something for men to take note of: In your sinful state you are prone to lead your wife badly, to dominate her, to treat her poorly, to treat her like a slave instead of a wife. Even while you love her you will sin against her. In fact, you will sin against your wife more than against any other person.

No longer co-equals, no longer different in function but equal in value and worth, God’s judgment foretold that a husband and wife would now battle one another for control. The wife would consider herself more valuable than the husband who would consider himself more important than the wife. This was the consequence of their sin. The woman’s lot would be one of suffering. Amidst all the joys of marriage and family there would be the pain of bearing children and the pain of an imperfect, sin-marred marriage.

Here is life after the Fall—womanhood and motherhood after the Fall. Here is the consequence for the woman’s sin. Her life which had been perfect and perfectly easy would now be marred by pain. Instead of having trouble-free and pain-free pregnancies, bearing children and raising them would be traumatic. Instead of being her husband’s helper she would now be prone to being his nemesis. Instead of leading his wife, a man would dominate her.

I consider most women to be natural socialists/fascists. They put a non-existent safety above liberty.
They engage in Groupthink.

I forgot where I got this from. It's been on my hard drive for
years.

Individuals are capable of being rational, but groups are not. They're narcissism personified. Hitler, who was crazy but who
understood propaganda, said groups were "feminine." If true, then I can only conclude women are less rational than men, and far more herd creatures. Not all, of course, but as a group, yes.

When you have Groupthink in government you invariably end up with catastrophes. Unfortunately, Groupthink is inherent in government.

Barbara Tuchman wrote a famous book about it, called The March of Folly.

"When, the norm for consensus (solidarity) over-rides realistic appraisal of information and appropriate courses of action to achieve the group's 'stated goals'."

Making decisions in a group is complicated by intellectual, social and psychological factors. Groups seek, analyze and use information differently than individuals.

Groupthink is a type of thinking/behavior that people become susceptible to when unanimity (solidarity) becomes more important (unconsciously) than the group's motivation to review and deal with information and action.

Groupthink is a defective decision-making process that can arise when members of any group favor "consensus seeking" (as in solidarity) over information processing. Groupthink is more likely to arise when the group is highly cohesive and similar to the exclusion of other points of view within the group. This is not to suggest that Groupthink is a product of only "fanatical" groups as the definition might imply. On the contrary, many groups of well-meaning responsible individuals can find themselves simply making bad or limited decisions based on "harmony of the group" verses the information at hand. Groupthink occurs in varying degrees and is usually unknown to the members effected by it. The more congenial the members of a policy making in-group, the greater the danger that independent critical thinking will be replaced by Groupthink, which is likely to result in irrational and dehumanizing actions directed against out-groups or individuals.

The classic example of Groupthink used by many group studies is the Bay of Pigs where the inner-core group surrounding JFK could and would not "see" the readily available information clearly indicating that the invasion would fail miserably. How was it possible that such intelligent top level advisors including the President could make such a disastrous decision? Groupthink. Solidarity became the driving force over information. JFK wanted to overthrow Castro and his advisors were unconsciously motivated by a need to support the President above all else to the exclusion of understanding the correct, yet contrary, data at hand or listening to the few advisors that tried point out the disaster that lie ahead. As is characteristics of Groupthink, the "dissenters" either gave in to intense internal pressures to support the President or were pushed out of the group. This is all well documented and a stunning example of how a group can state a goal and then not act properly to achieve it. With Groupthink, the stated goals become confused or replaced with an underlying unconscious goal of unanimity (solidarity). Extreme examples of Groupthink range from cults to mass suicides to genocide.

Tuesday, October 27, 2015

I've recently been thinking about teaching myself teleportation, but I realize there are some pretty bad problems associated with it. Indeed, fatal problems.

For one, the spin of the earth. The earth spins at about 1000 miles an hour at the equator. Let's say I jumped from either pole to the equator.

I'd go from barely moving at all to going 1000 miles an hour! You know what would happen? I not only would be killed, I'd be nothing but a very long red streak that somebody would have to clean up!

Now if I was to jump from the equator to either pole, I'd appear at the pole and instantly be going 1000 miles an hour. I'd just shoot off into the air, and of course inertia would squash my innards flat.

I could jump from either pole into space, and have no problem as long as my spacesuit went with me. But again, from the equator into space, and I'd materialize doing 1000 mph. The inertia would pancake me.

As best as I remember, the moon is doing about 60 miles a second, so I could jump from the earth to the trailing edge, and have no problem. But if I appeared on the leading edge, I'd hit at 60 miles a second.

Now that I think about it, I was conned by Star Trek That damn transporter would not work at all, unless the Enterprise was in a geosynchronous orbit. Otherwise, splat.

Vernor Vinge wrote a novel in which he tried to overcome the problems with teleportation. He did a pretty good job but his characters could teleport maybe a mile and had to appear in a big pot of water to overcome landing with the earth spinning under you.

The first novel I read about teleportation was Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination. He didn't even try to deal with the problems inherent in it. People were just zipping all over the place.

I don't even want to discuss the idea of being disintegrated and reconstituted by the transporter. That's just too horrible to even imagine.

I knew a girl in college who told a friend and me she was going to marry a rich man who would support her in her music career. I pointed out to her some women saw men as Success Objects and some men saw women as Beauty Objects (there is nothing new in the Manosphere, contrary to those who think there is), so if she was going to judge a man on his money, why should he not dump her when she lost her (merely okay) looks and find a younger woman? She gave me some excuses and rationalizations about "he should love me, etc." Then I asked her if she would stay with him if he lost all his money and of course she said, "Yes." Then I asked her if she could love him if he didn't have much money, or if a man should love her if she didn't have much looks, and you just hear the sound of her brain popping. These were things she had never considered, and didn't want to consider, because it was interfering with her Groovy Little Fantasy World.

I told her "that quite soon you will lose what looks you have, so if you don't find him really soon you are going to be up shit creek. For that matter, his money might go up but your looks will certainly go down, so it might get to the point you're too unattractive to use, so he'll trade you in for a newer model. You know, like a car."

She looked at me with pure hate, as if she wanted to kill you. I expected that.

She did get married but he wasn't anywhere near rich. Just a regular guy making a decent salary. I have no idea if she's still married, but if she's not she may have taken the route of blaming all her problems on men - and I've seen a lot of that.

Speaking of cougars, the worst I ever saw was a 75-year-old woman in hots pants and go-go boots - she apparently thought it was still 1966. She had, by the way, murdered her rich husband for his money - and somehow got away with it.

I also knew a very unpleasant middle-aged women who was such a horror to her well-to-do husband that he was seeing another woman and initiating divorce proceedings against his wife. She ran him over with her car and told the police: "He made me do it!" In her case, she went to prison.

I ran across the article below several years ago and recently ran across it again.

"A WOMAN WRITES:

"What am I doing wrong?

"Okay, I’m tired of beating around the bush. I’m a beautiful (spectacularly beautiful) 25 year old girl. I’m articulate and classy.

"I’m not from New York. I’m looking to get married to a guy who makes at least half a million a year. I know how that sounds, but keep in mind that a million a year is middle class in New York City, so I don’t think I’m overreaching at all.

"Are there any guys who make 500K or more on this board? Any wives? Could you send me some tips? I dated a business man who makes average around 200 – 250. But that’s where I seem to hit a roadblock. 250,000 won't get me to Central Park West. I know a woman in my yoga class who was married to an investment banker and lives in Tribeca, and she’s not as pretty as I am, nor is she a great genius. So what is she doing right? How do I get to her level?

"What are you looking for in a mate? Be honest guys, you won't hurt my feelings.

"Is there an age range I should be targeting (I'm 25)?

"Why are some of the women living lavish lifestyles on the Upper East Side so plain? I've seen really 'Plain Jane' boring types who have nothing to offer married to incredibly wealthy guys. I've seen drop dead gorgeous girls in singles bars in the east village. What's the story there?

"Jobs I should look out for? Everyone knows – lawyer, investment banker, doctor. How much do those guys really make? And where do they hang out? Where do the hedge fund guys hang out?

"How you decide marriage vs. just a girlfriend? I am looking for MARRIAGE ONLY
Please hold your insults – I'm putting myself out there in an honest way. Most beautiful women are superficial; at least I'm being up front about it. I wouldn't be searching for these kind of guys if I wasn't able to match them – in looks, culture, sophistication, and keeping a nice home and hearth."

"THE ANSWER:

"I read your posting with great interest and have thought meaningfully about your dilemma. I offer the following analysis of your predicament.

"Firstly, I’m not wasting your time, I qualify as a guy who fits your bill; that is I make more than $500K per year. That said here’s how I see it.

"Your offer, from the prospective of a guy like me, is plain and simple a crappy business deal. Here’s why. Cutting through all the B.S., what you suggest is a simple trade: you bring your looks to the party and I bring my money. Fine, simple. But here’s the rub, your looks will fade and my money will likely continue into perpetuity in fact, it is very likely that my income increases but it is an absolute certainty that you won't be getting any more beautiful!

"So, in economic terms you are a depreciating asset and I am an earning asset. Not only are you a depreciating asset, your depreciation accelerates! Let me explain, you're 25 now and will likely stay pretty hot for the next 5 years, but less so each year. Then the fade begins in earnest. By 35 stick a fork in you!

So in Wall Street terms, we would call you a trading position, not a buy and hold - hence the rub - marriage. It doesn’t make good business sense to buy you. (which is what you're asking) so I’d rather lease. In case you think I’m being cruel, I would say the following. If my money were to go away, so would you, so when your beauty fades I need an out. It's as simple as that. So a deal that makes sense is dating, not marriage.

Separately, I was taught early in my career about efficient markets. So, I wonder why a girl as 'articulate, classy and spectacularly beautiful' as you has been unable to find your sugar daddy. I find it hard to believe that if you are as gorgeous as you say you are that the $500K hasn’t found you, if not only for a tryout.

By the way, you could always find a way to make your own money and then we wouldn’t need to have this difficult conversation.

With all that said, I must say you’re going about it the right way.
Classic 'pump and dump.'

I hope this is helpful, and if you want to enter into some sort of lease, let me know."

Me again.

Society pretty much got around this problem in the past. One: when you got married it was very difficult to get unmarried. If a man got divorced, his career was shot to hell.

There was another, and better way: Love Goggles. Often, if a man and woman married young enough, no matter how old his wife got he still saw her as young.

There is a woman I know from 30 years ago in college. As bizarre as it sounds, she looks the same to me, even now.

When I was a kid W.T Grant's was the cutting edge store. It doesn't exist anymore (the one in my hometown is now a K-Mart).

Sooner or later it's going to happen to Wal-Mart.

I don't blame poor wages on McDonald's and Wal-Mart. Raising the minimum wage is just a band-aid; some businesses can raise it, and others will go out of business.

I blame the poor economy on the government, with its inflation, debt, regulations, Affirmative Action for incompetents.

One of my friend's father got an Associate Degree in I-Don't-Remember. He was old enough to have been in the Navy during WWII (which he said was "a waste of four years of my life").

He went to work for Sears (which is now owned by K-Mart, otherwwise it would have gone under), got regular raises, had benefits, and made a good middle-class living.

Of course, those days are now gone, and I don't blame it on the businesses. Again, I blame it on the government.

McDonald's in trouble. Wal-Mart is in trouble.

The middle-class is being destroyed, courtesy of the government, and it's affecting businesses from its stupidity and ignorance.

Some people think this is all due to a conspiracy by the "Powers That Be." There is no conspiracy, just a bunch of competing special-interest groups. Who decided to damage McDonald's and Wal-Mart, and to choose Amazon as a success? The market, that's who, and those businesses who made poor decisions.

If we had a really good economy wages would go up from competition for workers.

The get-a-good-job-be-taken-care-of-for-your-career lasted about 70 years. These days, you just about have to be a entrepreneur to make a decent living.

Monday, October 26, 2015

Transhumanism, in a nutshell, is the belief we can use
technology to transfer our consciousness into robotic bodies
and therefore free ourselves from all the ills flesh to heir to.

"Let's create a techno-utopia, a Singularity in which human nature is transformed via immortal and invulnerable robotic bodies!" I understand the desire, but it's still just babble.

I can't remember all the science-fiction stories and novels I've read
about Transhumanism (although there was no name for it then), starting when I was 11 or 12, which was the age when science fiction first
enthralled me. One story I do remember in
particular is a Keith Laumer one called "The Body Builders," in
which people's bodies are in storage flat on their backs while their consciousness is
transmitted to robot bodies, said robobodies being used as gladiators. He wrote it as a comedy, back in '67.

Kinda sound familiar?

The movie Chappie, which disappointed me (I've always
been impressed by Neill Blomkamp, except for this film), is the latest
installment in the Transhumanism narrative - people are transferred to robot bodies, along with robots who attain consciousness (think Short Circuit from the '80s - which is a comedy). I've read many
articles about Chappie on the Internet, ranging from Yeah! to Boo!

Unfortunately, Chappie is not a comedy (although there are comedic elements to it) but mostly it's dead serious. That's what
pretty much killed it for me, although I'm sure some people thought it was great, especially since Blomkamp makes the main villain a violent, brutal Christian
who actually crosses himself when he realizes that Chappie is alive and self-conscious. Then he tries to kill him, apparently thinking he's the incarnation of Satan.

To me, Transhumanism is old hat. For that matter, the Matrix movies
are old hat, too. Such stories have been around so long in
science fiction they've become tiresome cliches. Try to publish a story in which we're trapped in a machine's dream, or your consciousness is transferred into a robot or computer. It'll never be
published and if you keep doing it you'll get enough rejection
slips to paper a room.

In college I knew a student who wrote a story in which a man fell
in love with a female computer (huh?) so she transferred his consciousness into the computer to be with her. I couldn't bear to tell him it had no chance of ever being published.

Transhumanists, at least some of the believers, see this transfer as
a way to not only transcend our human bodies, but also our
sexes.

Of course, such people are overwhelmingly leftist,
who believe they are smarter and more moral than the
rest of us (Thomas Sowell mocked these people as "the Anointed"). The rest of us are just benighted dimwits trapped in
meat (there is a famous science fiction story - again a comedy - titled, "They're Made Out of Meat," which was about every alien race in
the galaxy not wanting to do anything with humans because we
have meat-brains).

To transcend the sexes! The end of patriarchy! Classes! Oppression!
Racism! Ageism! Whateverism! "And no religion, too!" to quote
the goofy John Lennon. Except for Transhumanism - which is a science fiction comedy.

It's the belief we can be as gods. Marxist gods, most probably.
Marxist or not, it's been a dream of mankind since who knows when.

These people are clearly materialists, who believe life and consciousness are just epiphenomena which, somehow, popped up from matter. So they'd better find some way to preserve said life
and consciousness before it goes poof. That's why Transhumanism is a
religion.

There is also the belief that someday we can transcend our
bodies, robotic or not, and become nonmaterial consciousness, with
near god-like powers. Arthur C. Clarke was big on that one, with 2001: a Space Odyssey and its sequels. And Childhood's End, for that matter, which was written in the early '50s. (Clarke was so sober and serious he made it seem possible. And significantly, in 3001 to use the word "God," in whatever context, was a faux pas which made people visibly wince.)

A lot of science fiction has been about making us god-like. I remember
reading Poul Anderson's Brain Wave, again when I was
about 12, and being suitably impressed by it. It was about how
the earth came out a a dead zone, in which it had been for probably
millions of year, and everyone's IQ shot up to about 400, which it
was normally supposed to be. Of course these godlings left the
earth, to keep watch over the retards left behind.

Apparently Tranhumanists have no idea how cliched, and how old, their
ideas are. You think they'd have some knowledge of science fiction,
what with their beliefs, but I guess not.

There are people today, Daddy Warbucks wealthy, who are spending a lot of money trying to achieve Transhumanist objectives. Hundreds of millions of dollars.

I can't help but remember that scene from the Bible where God
asks Satan what he was been doing, and he answers, "Oh, going
to and fro and up and down the earth." Causing trouble. A lot of
trouble.

Richard K. Morgan has written some very good novels, such as Altered
Carbon, in which people can transfer their
consciousness into robot bodies. More than one body at a time,
actually. And into human bodies, too, since in his world our
consciousness in stored in little devices implanted in the back of
the neck.

Morgan was just playing around and having a lot of fun, but the True Believers think these things are the next step
in our evolution to being god-like.

People are always trying to transcend their consciousness. That's
the purpose of drugs (the Moody Blues once had a song, "Timothy Leary
is Dead" when that zany guy was still alive). And religion, too, whether East or West.

Transhumanism is the attempt, which has been going on for hundreds of years, to turn science and technology into a religion, and use them
to turn us into gods. It never worked before, and it's not going
to work now, or in the future. But it's a free country and they can
spend their money on whatever they want. I just hope this stuff
is never taught in public schools. There is enough goofiness in
them already.

I've read criticisms of Transhumanism from the "It's a Mason/Illuminati/Satanic conspiracy!" conspironuts, and enthusiastic support from mutilated transgenders (no surprise there - from transgender to transhuman!). Either way,
it's how they get meaning, importance and community in their lives.

But all of them are wasting their time, money and lives. Personally I consider it amusing. Perhaps a tragicomedy is more accurate.

Transhumanism is a pipe dream. We're never going to transfer our
consciousness into robot bodies. It's a silly dream, one which will
always remain in the realm of bad science fiction.

Will anything good come out of all this money being spent? Sure.
Somewhere, somehow, there will be some good.

But overall, it will be a waste of money. They'd be better off spending their money trying to fix the bodies we are already in. Not that it's going to happen. To Transhumanists it's not grandiose enough.

Saturday, October 24, 2015

It's an illustration of Pareto's 80/20: rule: 20% of cleaning a
house
cleans
80% it, 20% of peas produce 80% of a crop. Things like that.

I have found that 80% of women are manpleasers, but with the
influence of feminism - even if these women don't call
themselves
feminists - it's down to about 20% by now.

I first noticed this phenomenon in college.

I've written before I spent my last year and a half living in a
studio apartment attached to a house with ten girls in it.
I got to know them very well.

Two of them were very much manpleasers and liked me very
much. That's 20%. Six of
them, in varying degrees, and both liked and hated me (talk
about confused!). Two weren't manpleasers, and would never
be (guess what they thought of me). The two who weren't
were very much leftist, including
one midwit who was working on a graduate degree in
political science (God know what leftist horrors she believes
now).

I believe it is an instinct among women to be manpleasers,
but that instinct can be warped by what they're taught. So, then,
women actually have two contradictory natures - to be subservient
and please men, and to try to control them with their socialist/fascist/envious/hate-filled natures (the last part is in the last part of the story of the Garden of Eden, with the comment about "your desire will be to control your husband but he shall rule you").

Is it any wonder that leftism is feminine, which means feminism is leftist - based on envy and
hate?

The six who were in varying degrees manpleasers were very
much confused
as a result of their feminist indoctrination and therefore
showed various degrees of hostility toward men, including
me. They were confused, as many women are today - and they
had to idea why except to blame it on me.

They wanted to please men but at the same time showed
hatred toward them. I remember thinking, what do these
goofballs want? Do they even know? Freud wondered
the same thing.

Here's a concrete example. I know a woman who admits she
is a "people pleaser." She's not. She's a manpleaser.

You think she'd be married and have kids. She's not. And it's
too late for either.

Knowing she's a manpleaser, I once asked her to make me a
sandwich (this is a good test for women).

She threw a fit. I thought, how odd, she wants to please
men but throws a conniption fit when I made a simple
request. I'm sure she considered my request "oppressive" and
me a patriarchial right-wing
sexist pig.

What's funny is that she really liked me and thought I was
funny and smart. But that leftist indoctrination had infected
her character to the point it ruined her life.

She also told me the men she gets involved with "won't accept
my career." I just smiled, because
men couldn't care less about a woman's "career." Men, except
the leftist manginas, are always going to put her desire to
please them over her "career."

This has happened a lot, with older women crying, "My kids!
My grandkids! Where are they?" They deluded themselves
they didn't need men, marriage and children and thought
career would fufill them. They fell for a bunch of lies.

When I owned a taxi I once picked up a woman who told
me her life's story (I got this all the time).

She was very much a manpleaser. She said she liked drawing a
bath for her husband before he came home from work and
having
dinner ready. Turned out, for some reason she never told me,
it didn't work out and they got divorced.

The Manosphere offers all kinds of advice toward men, a little
bit good, a lot terrible. But all of it is about turning women back
into they manpleasers they were meant to be.

Women have always been the emotional, the receptive and the dependent.
That's
their nature. This means
they're far more liable than men to believe stupid things.
They accept it almost uncritically, and since many women
are natural socialists/fascists, they fall right into that
trap, and since they are very much prone, in their childish
way, to blame their problems on men, their leftist
indoctrination feeds right into that.

No woman can be both a fascist/socialist and a manpleaser. I remember
reading an article many years ago in which all those '60s feminists
admitted the were romantics - but what they wanted a tall, brilliant,
rich, handsome man
who was a socialist/fascist - in other words, a man who does not
exist.

For that matter, Gloria Steinem has been described as a hopeless
romantic, one who is dependent on men. She finally got married after
spending her life denigrating it and saw fertility clinics in
hope of getting pregnant. And Betty Friedan, that hideous monster,
got married and had kids. And when younger she was a Stalinist.
When older, who knows? Except for being uglier than when younger.

Ultimately men have let this happen. Why? A misguided
sense of fairness? Finally they're realizing "fairness" is not what
it is, not when whenever men give women what they want,
they want more
and throw a lot of it back in men's faces.

Whenever men go, women follow. They're 100% dependent
on men, since men
created everything in the world. Then they want to impose their
socialism/fascism on it.

I once had a girlfriend who was originally a socialist/fascist. She
was very smart, with an IQ of 143 and an MBA in Accounting and Finance. She got involved with a man whom she followed into being a
libertarian. Then later, she got involved with me.

Where men went, even she followed.

I actually remember meeting older women, when I was about
19, who told me that women weren't the equal of men. At that
time I was surprised they said that. But now I realize they
were right; women really are the weaker vessel.

When I was in middle school the girls were required to
take home economics. I'm sure this doesn't happen anymore,
with the more radical of feminists throwing a fit until this
requirement was dropped.

Again, ultimately it's men's fault for allowing this to happen, because they don't understand that contradictory nature of women. Men in the past did,
which is why women have never been allowed to vote.

Of course, none of this will stand, but how long until things
straighten up? That, always, in the question.